Category: Platforms

New Memory Card Format Aimed at 3G Phones

Motorola will be using a new memory card format in their new phones (the E1000 and A1000, reported here this week), with capacities from 32mb to 512mb. These new cards are about half the size of a SIM, making them slightly smaller than the miniSD format, which was launched less than a year ago.

The cards are intended to be removable so that users can share files or transfer data. The specification for the cards will be open, so other manufacturers will be able to adopt it. No details for performance or electrical characteristics have been released yet.

Chances are then, that your PDA, phone, games console, MP3 player, robot dog and camera will all use entirely different memory cards. If that’s not enough to send you sobbing down to the shops to get a new all-in-one device, then we don’t know what is.

PC World almost seem pleased

3G: “The Networks are Ready, but the Phones Aren’t”

One of the many things coming out of the 3GSM Summit is the conflict between mobile network operators like Vodafone and T-Mobile and handset manufacturers: the network operators have made the networks, but the phones aren’t good enough to entice users to subscribe.

Mobile phone operators spent billions of euros on licenses to run 3G networks and are understandably concerned that they have not been able to make full use of new revenue opportunities.

At the 3GSM summit in Cannes, Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone criticised existing phones for being bulky, possessing poor battery life and featuring unsatisfactory heat dissipation. He added “The experience today is unacceptable to our customers.”

Part of the problem is related to poor coverage in Europe. Not only does this mean that services are simply unavailable in areas, but it also requires that the phones run in dual 2G/3G mode, thus consuming far more power – hence the heat and battery problems not generally witnessed in Japan which has far better coverage. Since it is projected that, even by 2008, only 75% of all phones will be 3G, dual mode issues are expected to be around for a while.

Some see Sarin’s comments as a little dig at Nokia, with whom Vodafone have had a stormy relationship over the years, but with Nokia expected to have a strong 3G handset offering by the end of 2004, things seemed to have thawed between Sarin and Nokia’s CEO Jorma Ollila.

The Nokia/Vodafone Lovefest

Sarin: GSM stands for “God Send Mobiles”

Two New 3G Handsets from Motorola

The A1000 and E1000 from Motorola are two new, feature-rich phones aimed at covering two separate, but often intersecting, markets: business users and gamers.

The A1000 is intended to meet mobile business needs, is based on the Symbian 7.0 OS. Along with the usual camera/gprs/streaming/email/browser package we’ve come to expect, it allows users to view files of a number of formats whilst on the move, including Microsoft Office and PDFs.

The standard PIM applications are all here: calendar, contacts and notes, and the phone will synchronise with your desktop/laptop though USB and Bluetooth.

As the phone supports the J2ME platform, further applications and treats can be downloaded and installed.

The other phone, the E1000 is an attempt to get into the rapidly growing mobile gaming and entertainment market. The phone features a camera and MP3 player and promises a very striking 260,000 colour display, with 240×320 resolution.

The E1000 will offer location-based services through A-GPS, which could provide interesting and innovative entertainment applications in the very near future.

Infosync World

Nokia Announce Updated 9500 Communicator

After having blazed a trail with their originally Communicator almost ten years ago, Nokia have worked for the last year to develop and have now releases a new compact, lighter version called the 9500.

Working closely with IBM to target it at corporate users, they feel it will be particular useful to sales and support staff. This is being perceived as Nokia determination to be a big player in this market which Microsoft is applying a lot of attention to, as are Symbians co-developer Psion. Andy Brown, analyst at research group IDC says “The world’s number one in e-business services hooks up with the number one in mobile devices. This tells me Nokia is serious about developing products for enterprises, which I wasn’t sure about before.”

Thought to retail for around 800 euros (£538, US$1,000), it now support WiFi as well as cellular communications.

Nokia Boss Admits N-Gage Below Expectations

Jorma Ollila Nokia chairman and chief executive, admitted to the Financial Times yesterday that the N-Gage, their gaming platform, has not been the success they had hoped for, in his words “The sales are in the lower quartile of the bracket we had as our goal.”

The original aim was to sell 9 million units within its first two years, but many feel that the €300 (£200, US$380) is too expensive when compared with other gaming-only platforms such as the Nintendo GameBoy. It has also been criticised for its lack of game support and difficulty in operating it, in particular requiring the removal of the battery to change the game. The cracking of their game copy protection method last year has also not helped them with game publishers.

Ollila said he plans to wait until November 2005 to decide if it has been a success or failure.

Europe’s first mega-pixel camera phone launched by Vodafone

Vodafone has beaten the rest of the market to be the first to bring a mega-pixel camera to Europe. In a further development of their relationship with Sharp, it will be Sharp GX30.

Not content with being just a mega-pixel camera, this quad-band (GSM) phone of many features incorporates an MP3 player, offers Bluetooth support, has a removable SD memory cards and provides video message functionality. The screen on the handset has been significantly uprated to be capable of displaying 262,144 colours, four times its previous model, the GX20. It will be available in retail stores from March 2004.

Breaking the mega-pixel barrier is significant. At this resolution the photographs start to become useful beyond simply sending them other phones. The quality is sufficient to print them out and services such as Pixology (We QuickLinked earlier), are planning to take advantage of the always increasing resolutions.

The other direct benefit for Vodafone in higher resolution cameras’ becoming the norm is in increasing their call income – the higher the resolution, the more data there is to transmit, the higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Raising ARPU is the mantra for mobile operators.

Vodafone’s global presence means it has tremendous clout and purchasing power enabling it to secure exclusive deals with phone manufacturers. It is known in the industry that Vodafone is keen to develop its own, branded phones in an attempt to break the power of Nokia on the phone market. They want to move their users from identifying with the make of handset, “I’ve got a Nokia” to “I’ve got a Vodafone”. Extending the relationship with Sharp is a further step towards that.

Vodafone

Sharp phones

ATI Announce HTDV PVR Card

ATI Technologies have announced they will be releasing a card capable of receiving and storing US-standard HDTV. Called the HDTV Wonder, the add-on card will receive standard NTSC cable as well as free-to-air HDTV broadcasts enabling content to be saved to the computers hard drive. Full PVR functionality will available, as will the ability to burn recordings direct to DVD.

They plan bundle it with a selection of their All-in-Wonder graphics cards and make it available as a standalone product when they release it in the spring. The price hasn’t been disclosed.

No word has been received from them as to whether the card will comply with the FCC Broadcast flag requirements.

Hy-Tek are getting to free publicity, by announcing their will be releasing two wide-screen all-in-one multimedia computers, Tekpanel 300HD and the Tekpanel 370HD which will incorporate the card.

ATI

Hy-Tek

Akimbo Launch PVR-over-IP Box

Akimbo Systems launched their television-via-Internet service yesterday at Demo2004. They are claiming the service will start with over 10,000 hours of video content, organised in to 50 categories, will be pulled from a variety of sources. The number of hours available will grow to 20,000.

The $199 player, which is expected to be in US retail stores in late 2004, receives content via a broadband connection and can hold 200 hours of video, in Microsoft’s WM9 DRM-controlled format on it’s 80Gb drive. Subscription to the service is $9.99 per month.

This product is the first of released example of the long spoken about idea of distributing content by passing previously used broadcast structures. Akimbo claim a number of factors have now come together to enable the services to become realistic; the cost of transporting a gigabyte of video over the Internet has dropped to around $1 from $20 a few years ago; video compression has improved to the point that DVD-quality video can fit into a 1.5 megabit per second stream; broadband has grown to an audience of 50m people.

Given it is initially a dedicated box, that we assume will be closed to customer enhancements, it will live or die by the content they can secure for the service. We suspect the service may well morph in to a content channel when more PC’s are connected to the TV in the lounge.

Akimbo are canvassing for new content from video rights owners and are giving the option for subscription, rental, purchase, or advertising supported model. Their big pitch is niche content direct to the consumer and they will handle transactions, delivering the due fees to the rights holders.

We feel the other vital component for them to get right is the navigation of the content, enabling consumers to actually find the programmes that they want to watch.

Akimbo

Phone-on-a-chip Coming Soon

Bill Krenik, who heads up research and development in Texas Instruments (TI) wireless terminals business unit has been revealing the companies intention to create an integrated chip that will hold all of the functionality of a current smartphone, on a single chip. TI plan to have it available by the end of 2004.

TI, the world’s largest maker of cell phone chips say the integrated chip would reduction power consumption by a half and free up large amounts of the valuable system board real estate for additional chips providing features Wi-Fi high-speed wireless networking and satellite location tracking to be added to phones.

TI is not alone in thinking along these lines. Samsung were speaking about this very idea last week. They prefer the term System-in-Package chip and plan to show it at the coming GSM World Congress Conference in Cannes. Their chip will include a 203MHz ARM-based processor with 256MB of NAND flash memory, 256MB of SDRAM and support for USB.